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Saturday, December 07, 2013

Launched in 2008, the
Children’s Dental Policy arm of The Pew Charitable Trusts is using its political
clout and money, coupled with misinformation and untruths, to promote
fluoridation initiatives and preserve existing schemes in many cities and
states.

According to Pew’s
fluoridation promoter Matt Jacob (Ref 1), Pew’s outreach to states for community
water fluoridation (CWF) included the following:

Arkansas: “Funded a poll and offered other assistance to pass a state
mandate in 2011.”

California: “Provided assistance to a successful campaign to secure CWF
in San Jose.”

Montana: “Assisted successful effort to preserve CWF in the city of
Bozeman.”

New Hampshire: “Helped defeat a statewide ban on
CWF.”

Oregon: “Offering funds and research for a campaign in
Portland."

Wisconsin: “Provided research and technical assistance to preserve CWF in
Milwaukee.”

Pew loses in Wichita and
PortlandHowever, PEW’s PR, money and
devious tactics lost big time to common sense and truth in Portland Oregon and
Wichita Kansas when voters rejected fluoridation in referenda in both towns with
a margin of 60% to 40%.

Buying
votesIn Portland the
pro-fluoridation team –aided by PEW - outspent citizens opposed to fluoridation
3 to 1 and gave at
least $143,000 to local minority groups who supported fluoridation. These five groups each received $20,000:
Urban League of Portland, the Latino Network, the Asian Pacific American Network
of Oregon, Center for Intercultural Organizing, and the Immigrant & Refugee
Community Organization. The Oregon Latino Health Coalition got $5,000, while the
Native American Youth and Family Center received $37,810. The Portland chapter
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who
opposed fluoridation, received nothing (Ref 2).

Pew hires Willam
MaasIn an effort to sway voters
and decision makers, Pew has hired as its fluoridation adviser, dentist William
Maas, former head of the CDC’s Oral Health Division. Those credentials may look
impressive on paper but not in person. When grilled by the Sedgwick (KS) County
Commission, he looked nervous and admitted that the so-called “mild” fluorosis
(in this category 50% of the enamel of the affected teeth is impacted) occurs
even in children who live in non-fluoridated communities, and then he actually
claimed fluorosis is attractive. (Watch the
hearing – Maas speaks at 31:00
minutes).This remark angered a
Sedgwick Commissioner who says others may not find it so attractive. The
Sedgwick Commissioner was right. Studies have repeatedly found that
children
find teeth with so-called “mild” fluorosis to be
objectionable – a point that even the
CDC, Maas’s old boss, has conceded.

The Sedgwick Commissioner
added:

“If I found on my daughter’s teeth a substance that is abnormal, caused
by chemicals introduced in our water supply … I’d be beyond irritated,” Skelton
said. “I would wonder what internal effects would be going on, what kind of
white spots is she going to have on her bones, etc. That’s a symptom of
something larger, sir (Ref 3).”

Pew spokesperson Bill Maas insults
opponent but won’t debateIn another appearance in
Wichita a citizen asked Maas if he would debate the head of FAN, retired
environmental chemistry Professor Paul Connett. He refused saying that Connett
was a brilliant debater and he (Maas) had only given about 6 public
presentations. But then he added that Connett was “the leader of misinformation
on this issue in the country.” This didn’t sit well with citizens at the
meeting, most recognizing that you shouldn’t insult someone if you are not
prepared to take that person on in public when
challenged.

Pew continues to mislead the public
on the Harvard IQ studyIn
the Pew
Children's Dental Campaign October 2013 letter to Des Moines Water Works (Ref
4) Shelly Gehshan, Director, Children’s
Dental Policy continues to misrepresent and misreport the fluoride/IQ
studies conducted by a Harvard team
(Choi et al., 2012) even though FAN and others have corrected her
misrepresentations in
media release. Gehshan wrote the essentially the same misinformation in a July 2013 letter to The Dalles (Oregon)

Pew’s Gehshan confuses concentration
and doseMs. Gehshan
writes that the “levels of fluoride
in the water” (i.e. concentration) in the IQ studies were at least “four
or five times higher than the level used to fluoridate water in Des Moines” (Ref
4) thus continuing to confuse the difference between concentration
(measured in mg of fluoride per liter) and dose (measured in mg fluoride
ingested per day). The latter depends upon how much water people drink and how
much fluoride they get from other sources. According to Paul Connett,
“An above average water drinker in a fluoridated community, and also getting
fluoride from other sources, could easily get more fluoride than a below average
water consumer in several of the Chinese studies.”

The need for margin of safety
ignored by GehshanConnett adds, “To make
matters worse Gehshan’s simplistic comparison ignored the larger concern for the
need to apply a margin of safety to a dose that has been found to cause harm in
order to protect the most vulnerable children in a large population. For this a
safety factor of 10 is usually chosen. The job of people in regulatory agencies
is to make sure they are protecting everyone not just the average person.
Gehshan should know that.”

A false
chargeGehshan also repeated the
false charge that “the Harvard researchers [Grandjean and
Choi] publicly
distanced themselves from the way that anti-fluoride groups were misrepresenting
these IQ studies.” In actual fact Choi and Grandjean tried to distance
themselves from comments made by a
Wichita journalist who claimed that the Harvard team thought the study was
irrelevant to U.S. populations.

The truth,
Grandjean
writes, is that "only 4 of 27
studies" in the Harvard review used had high water fluoride levels, and "clear
differences" in IQ "were found at much lower
exposures."

One of the first tactics of
fluoridation promotion, as advised by Pew’s PR fluoridation specialist Matt
Jacob, is to identify a problem and lead with a
need. So Portland fluoridation promoters claimed that
non-fluoridated Portland has more tooth decay than fluoridated portions of
Oregon. An ABC-TV investigative
reporter looked into this claim and
found it to be untrue. In fact, non-fluoridated Portland children actually have
less tooth decay than those in fluoridated areas.

Pew sullying its
reputationFor many people who have
respected the Pew Charitable Trusts on other issues, its cavalier disregard of
the possibility that a practice that Pew is advocating – in the name of
improving children’s health - may actually be lowering children’s IQ is very
disturbing. Especially so since this Foundation claims on its
website:

The Pew
Charitable Trusts is driven by the power of knowledge
to solve today's most challenging problems. Pew applies a rigorous, analytical
approach to improve public policy, inform the public and stimulate civic life.

In
conclusionThe problem when advocates -
with a lot of money to spend - hire a PR firm to present their side of the story
is that truth and honest science go out of the window. Winning is everything.
That’s what the PR firm is paid to do. That is what Pew is trying to do. But
citizen power is capable of beating this “machine” when the truth is on their
side and they are prepared to organize as the citizens in Wichita and Portland
did. FAN was pleased to help.